Frances to William and others.
Dealing with any relation that might exist between art and science remains a complicated thorn for me. In regard to speculating about their origins, the question might be whether art or science came first in the evolution of humanity. It seems clear that in the evolution of humans their intelligence must have came before their art or science, because a dumb brute brain cannot be filled with the signs and symbols of art or science, or language for that matter. The causes of art and science in any event would of course seem to lay with the growth of humanity, but not necessarily within the realm of knowledge. Even primordial persons and primitive peoples after all engage in such acts. This implies that these acts are grounded in biotics and anthropics, rather than in ethnics and epistemics. The determination of objects being art and science would therefore lay initially with feelings, rather than mainly with knowings. This then is a fuzzy contradiction for me. What the artist and the scientist may have in common is the "independent" awareness of their feeling or knowing the very objects and actions they engage. They should after all pursue their activities for its own sake, and expect nothing in return for the effort. It may be that the artist wishes to feel what the form of an artwork really might be and for the pure sake of it, even independent of being aware of feeling it, but whether the artist in so feeling has the same feeling simultaneously towards art as a typical class itself is unclear. In other words, the artist engaged in doing art may not care about it. If the particular token as say an artifice, and its global tone as say some artfulness, and the global type as say the art, are all felt together at once by the artist in the one artwork, then this suggests that tonal qualities and typical classes can very well be as objective as the token fact that carries or implies them; and independent of mind. This is a metaphysical conclusion, but would be supported by idealist realism and its naturalist pragmatism. Furthermore, if art and science are held to be objective global classes, then the forms of art and the laws of science must also exist objectively and independent of mind. The factuality and the actuality of such existent classes and forms and laws would exist independent of mind, but the reality of such things would be dependent on subjective sense and thus mind. Under such a realist approach even imagined fantasies and deluded illusions and fictional figures and alien worlds would be justly sensed as real. The artist in doing their art may assume a goal, be it the substantive manifestation of attributed essences as a reality, which implies some "dependent" awareness in contradiction to mainly an "independent" awareness, but then all art in being pursued for the sake of the pursuit itself tends to suggest that art is functionally functionless. William wrote. I don't see this issue as very complicated. A scientist wants to know what a thing really is, independent of our knowing it. That's the goal. It's understood that some part of knowing is subjective, limited by the human brain and how we think but that does not preclude the properties of independent things being identified, measured, etc. An artist may work as a scientist, as some Renaissance artists did, more or less, but most commonly artists want to express an experience of something, be it objective or subjective or both. Generally the artist's goal differs from the scientist's goal, the scientist wants to know the objective reality and the artist wants to express the subjective reality, both in a matter of, let's say, degrees.
